Film Club by David Gilmour
January 21st, 2009Title: Film Club
Author: David Gilmour
Publisher: Twelve Publishing (2008)
At first when I saw this book, I thought it was written by the David Glimour of Pink Floyd fame. I was a little disappointed that it was not. It was, however, written by David Gilmour of Canadian TV fame. So that’s something. Gilmour was a film critic for the CBC and has done a lot of film/entertainment work for a lot of different TV shows and publications. My point is that he has credibility as a film critic.
Film Club: A Memoir by David Gilmour is an…odd…book. I don’t use the word odd in a bad sense…I just can’t think of a better word to use. You see…Gilmour’s son, Jesse, was not a fan of school. At the age of 16 he hated it. Gilmour decided that he would let Jesse quit school if he watched 3 movies a week with dad. Obviously, Jesse jumped all over that opportunity. Jesse is not a brainiac mind you, at one point asking dad where Florida is. To be fair, they are in Toronto and I don’t know all of the geography of Canada either. But still!
The book interlaces film critique of movies they watched with the happenings in Jesse and David’s life. For me, as a movie fan, it was more interesting to read about the movies than about Jesse’s life. I found a couple of movies that I will watch now because of reading about it in this book. The rest of the book about Jesse’s time as a dropout was not as interesting to me. I’m not a father…but it seems to me that Gilmour isn’t much of one either. Obviously things happened that aren’t included in the book…but the decisions he made don’t seem to be all that great. They were hard decisions though. I don’t know what I would do if my kid dropped out of school, started a rap group and occasionally went on cocaine benders. So who knows.
The book reads very quickly as they go from movie to movie. You don’t really find out what happened to Jesse except things seem to be better for him now. I think a film critique book probably would have been better for what I was interested in though.
Rating: 3 out of 5
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